Since its inception, Calpont has gone through multiple management teams, strategies, and investor groups. What it hadn’t done, ever, is actually shipped a product. Last week, however, Calpont introduced a free/open source DBMS, InfiniDB, with technical details somewhat reminiscent of what Calpont was promising last April. Highlights include:

Like Infobright, Calpont’s InfiniDB is a columnar DBMS consisting of a MySQL front end and a columnar storage engine.

Community edition InfiniDB runs on a single server.

One of commercial/enterprise edition InfiniDB’s main claims to fame will be MPP support.

There’s no announced time frame for commercial edition InfiniDB.

InfiniDB’s current compression story is dictionary/token only, with decompression occurring before joins are executed. Improvement is a roadmap item.

Indeed, InfiniDB has many roadmap items, a few of which can be found here. Also, a great overview of InfiniDB’s current state and roadmap can be found in this MySQL Performance Blog thread. (And follow the links there to find performance discussions of other free analytic DBMS.)

One thing InfiniDB already has that is still a roadmap item for Infobright is the ability to run a query across multiple cores at once.

One thing free InfiniDB has that Infobright only offers in its Enterprise Edition is ACID-compliant Insert/Update/Delete. (Note: I wish people would stop saying that Infobright Enterprise Edition isn’t ACID-compliant, since that point was cleared up a while ago.)

InfiniDB has no indexes or materialized views.

However, InfiniDB’s retrieval is expedited by something called “Extents,” which sounds a lot like Netezza’s zone maps.

Being on vacation, I’ll stop there for now. (If it weren’t for Tropical Storm/ depression Ida, I might not even be posting this much until I get back.)